The Long Home
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4.1 • 18 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In a literary voice that is both original and powerfully unsettling, William Gay tells the story of Nathan Winer, a young and headstrong Tennessee carpenter who lost his father years ago to a human evil that is greater and closer at hand than any the boy can imagine - until he learns of it first-hand. Gay's remarkable debut novel, 'The Long Home', is also the story of Amber Rose, a beautiful young woman forced to live beneath that evil who recognizes even as a child that Nathan is her first and last chance at escape. And it is the story of William Tell Oliver, a solitary old man who watches the growing evil from the dark woods and adds to his own weathered guilt by failing to do anything about it. Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, 'The Long Home' will bring to mind once again the greatest Southern novelists and will haunt the reader with its sense of solitude , longing, and the deliverance that is always just out of reach.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gay's debut, an ambitious saga of love and retribution set in backwoods Georgia in the 1950s, is by turns quaint and charged--and sometimes both. The novel begins with the 1932 murder of Nathan Winer, an honest and virtuous laborer, by Dallas Hardin, a corrupt small-town tycoon, after Winer demands that Hardin move his illegal whiskey still off Winer's land. Hardin gradually gains control of his community through extortion, bribery and psychological manipulation. When the dead man's son, also Nathan, unwittingly becomes a carpenter for his father's murderer many years afterwards, he finds his life bound with Hardin's as he falls in love with seductive beauty Amber Rose, frequently used by Hardin as an escort for his rich acquaintances. Ancient sage and recluse William Tell Oliver, who witnessed the elder Nathan's death and has the victim's skull to prove it, steps in to rectify old wrongs when Hardin threatens to kill the young Winer to maintain control over Amber Rose. A haze of mystery hangs over the narrative: voices whisper and strange lights shine from deep within swampy forests, testifying to the presence of a force more powerful than any petty human tyrant. Strange characters inhabit Gay's world, too, like a boy who thinks baby pigs come from underground or a traveling salesman who brags about his largesse but lives off of Winer's mother. Though his dialogue may sometimes be too twangy, Gay writes well-crafted prose that unfolds toward necessary (if occasionally unexpected) conclusions. Enhanced by his feeling for country rhythms and a pervasive, biblical sense of justice, Gay's take on the Southern morality tale is skillfully achieved, if familiar in its scope.
